Panel Line and Rivet Shading

[adlabs6]

For this article I'll share some techniques I've used to make my panel lines and rivets blend more smoothly into my skin work. In my early skins, you can see that my panel lines are very obvious, and I later wanted to tone this down, but just less opacity didn't look very good in some cases.

Firstly, we'll show a basic panel and rivet set, drawn in pure black and white, using the techniques shown in other tutorials on this site.



Using a simple gray base color, with surface shaders created using techniques in my surface effects tutorial on this site. Panel lines and rivets in black are way to obvious as you can see.



The most basic solution is to just lower the rivet and line transparency, but this sometimes just looks washed out as shown below. I'll outline some better options.



My favorite method involves making copies of the rivet and panel layers, and manipulating them. Lets take the panel lines. Copy the layer, and invert the color on the copy layer, then move it below the original panel line layer. Now you should have black lines, over white lines. Now by using the "gaussion blur" filter on the white lines layer to blur it and make the edges soft, you should get this effect when the black line layer is hidden:



When you add back in the black line layer and adjust their transparencies to look good, you get this effect. Notice the small white high light rim around each panel line? I personally think this has more depth than just fading the black lines.



Now repeat this process on the rivets layer, and adjust their transparencies to get a nice shine around each rivet as shown below, first the white rivets only:



And now with the black rivets layer added in, a nice subtle effect, but also not looking simply faded:



Now lets add in a camo paint layer behind these layers. We'll have to re-adjust the transparencies when we change the colors, but this is quite easy and makes for a better match to the camo colors The result is quite subtle, and you can still see the white high lighting around the lines and rivets very faintly blending into the overall scheme.



As a final effect, you can make some of the rivets on the surface have a brighter shine effect, as though they are worn. Just make a copy of the black rivets layer, and invert the color to white (pressing "CTRL"+"i" does this). Now use an eraser with a feathered brush, and randomly erase most of the white rivets, being careful to leave small patches here and there of light ones. Adjust the layer transparency to best fit them into your skin. Here's my results:



Very nice I think, and better looking than when I just fade the lines and rivets. Hope this is helpful!
-adlabs6

[96th_Nightshifter]

Very nice tutorial mate

[Ebo]

This is indeed a very useful tutorial. I did some experimentation myself, and must say your results are magnificent.

Thanks for sharing

Ebo

[adlabs6]

Glad this article has been of help!